Tutorials

This version of the class is aimed at the mid-level sysadmin. You manage servers and/or network gear, look at packet traces, poke through logs … but wouldn’t consider yourself an expert at any of this. You want a chance to tackle the problem on your own, then guided practice on technique: analyzing a packet trace for performance problems, extracting insights from trending charts, correlating log entries from multiple devices. In this version of the class, we spend more time together reviewing concepts (e.g. caching and spindles), applying techniques (e.g. Wireshark features), asking questions (e.g. TCP, SMB, and NFS).

Troubleshooting is hard. In hindsight, the answer to a problem is often obvious, but in the chaos and confusion of the moment — with too much data flowing in, time pressure, misleading clues — slicing through the distractions and focusing on the key elements is tough. This is a hands-on seminar: you will work through case studies taken from real-world situations. We divide into groups of 3-5, review a simplified version of Advance7’s Rapid Problem Resolution (RPR) methodology, and then oscillate, on a half-hour cycle, between coming together as a class and splitting into groups. During class time, I describe the scenario, explain the current RPR step, and offer to role-play key actors. During group time, I walk around, coaching and answering questions.

This version of the class is aimed at the senior sysadmin — you have a decade or more experience in the industry, you are T-shaped (specialize in one or two areas but have expertise across a range of technologies), you have accumulated numerous technical skills: now you want to deepen your meta-expertise. We will recreate the fog of war, then you’ll practice applying a methodology to focus your attention, working with your team to divvy up tasks and escalate key insights to each other, integrating clues from a range of sources. In this version of the class, we spend more time in small group. (For those of you who attended last year: similar experience, but I’ll offer fresh case studies.)

Troubleshooting is hard. In hindsight, the answer to a problem is often obvious, but in the chaos and confusion of the moment — with too much data flowing in, time pressure, misleading clues — slicing through the distractions and focusing on the key elements is tough. This is a hands-on seminar: you will work through case studies taken from real-world situations. We divide into groups of 3-5, review a simplified version of Advance7’s Rapid Problem Resolution (RPR) methodology, and then oscillate, on a half-hour cycle, between coming together as a class and splitting into groups. During class time, I describe the scenario, explain the current RPR step, and offer to role-play key actors. During group time, I walk around, coaching and answering questions.

PowerShell Fundamentals will provide students with a basic foundation to begin leveraging PowerShell to accomplish standard systems admin focused tasks by teaching some concrete techniques that they can begin using immediately. The course begins with some of the basic terminology, as well as the four essential commands to using PowerShell. The course progresses into a number of task-based examples of system administration style tasks. We end the course covering how PowerShell fits into the overall administrative ecosystem and cover some additional differences between PowerShell V2 and V3.

Building Your PowerShell Toolkit will take you from using basic commands to developing scripts and functions. From there, we will go even further and package those scripts and functions as a solution that is reusable, redistributable, and work with the maximum variety of input data. The course will cover error handling, creating help files, working with the pipeline (for receiving input and processing data), and a variety of tips and tricks to make your functions robust and practical. Also covered will be the ins and outs of packaging your commands as modules, creating module manifests, and things to consider with module development.

Resolv the World with Chef: An Introduction to Chef for Sysadmins (Saturday Morning)

Slides available
In this half-day tutorial, attendees will learn about the benefits of managing infrastructure with Chef. The tutorial will walk attendees through all of the set-up required to get started with Chef. A practical example, managing resolv.conf file, will be used as a way to jump-start attendees knowledge of Chef and the workflow used to build a project in Chef. A combination of demos and hands-on exercises will provide attendees the skills necessary to begin managing infrastructure automation with Chef.

Every sysadmin I know has at least four new technologies they would like to play with–and that’s just before breakfast. But finding the time to do this can be difficult, often because of the effort it takes to find a machine, set up the network connection, to firewall it from the other machines, and so on… If you want to try something that requires multiple components, that’s even worse.

What you need is a sandbox. A place where you can experiment with new technologies, mess with cool tools, test the latest versions of software, prototype new services and so on without any sort of heavyweight effort.

This class will show you how to build your own sysadmin sandboxes. We’ll explore using software and services like git, Vagrant and Amazon EC2 to make sandbox construction easy and free/inexpensive. We’ll also talk about when a sandbox approach is and is not appropriate, migrating your work in and out of them, and how to share the work you’ve done in a sandbox with others.

WHO IS THIS TUTORIAL FOR:
This tutorial will target sysadmins who want to learn specific skills that allow them to work more effectively with senior management within the organization. This course is intended to provide you with skills that are associated with senior IT staff. The focus of this tutorial is understanding the gap between IT operations and management and how to bridge that gap to increase respect for IT and improve your relationship with management. We will cover identifying your role within the organization, effective communication with upper management, positioning yourself to increase your visibility, and becoming the go-to person/group for IT within your organization.

WHAT IS THIS TUTORIAL ABOUT:
This tutorial provides guidelines and suggestions to improve the communication and collaboration of sysadmins and directly increase effectiveness when working with senior management. Topics include:

Examining the divide between management and IT

Defining “management” within your organization

How to communicate effectively between management and IT operations

Demonstrating the value of your work in a way that management will understand

Ways to communicate the benefits of supporting a strong IT presence

Knowledge and information management

How to develop a collaborative relationship with your management that enables both sides to be successful

TAKEAWAYS:
At the end of the tutorial, participants will be able to:

Identify the management team relevant to IT in their organization

Understand and plan branding, both individually and for their team

Compose effective emails that get results

Effectively communicate IT priorities and goals to management

Improve communication within the IT group

Translate business goals into IT priorities

Work collaboratively with management

Plan and conduct effective and efficient meetings

Return to work and start building that trusted IT advisor relationship

Navigating the Business World for Sysadmins: Methods (Friday Afternoon)

WHO IS THIS TUTORIAL FOR:
This tutorial will target sysadmins who want to learn specific skills that allow them to work more effectively with senior management within the organization. This course is intended to provide you with skills that are associated with senior IT staff.

WHAT IS THIS TUTORIAL ABOUT:
This tutorial provides guidelines and suggestions to support core business processes and directly increase effectiveness when working with senior management. Topics include:

Budgeting 101 (Includes the importance of the budget, how to draft a budget, selling your budget to management, and the importance of including impacts.)

How to sell an IT concept to non-IT people (e.g., agile development, devops, cloud computing).

Positioning IT as a valuable asset to the organization. (Includes understanding your organization’s core business and linking the contribution of IT to that business. For example, if security is a primary focus for the company, ensure that IT is protecting the organization’s critical assets.)

Untangling IT Metrics. (Includes the importance of metrics, selecting the right metric, developing your own, and using metrics effectively.)

This tutorial will provide both a conceptual and practical introduction to IPv6. It begins by covering the abstract concepts behind IPv6 addressing and structure, then reinforces those concepts with real world practical examples, including exercises in planning IPv6 address spaces. Beyond this, the tutorial focuses on the operational aspects of deploying IPv6. The tutorial focuses on conveying conceptual knowledge reinforced with simplified, but practical examples.

The Compassionate Geek: Mastering Customer Service for IT Professionals (Friday Morning)

Today’s IT professional must master two skill families in order to be successful. The first is technical skills
and knowledge. That’s obvious. Without a solid technical understanding, you simply can’t do the job. The
second is how to improve customer service. That means developing an ability to understand, get along
with, and influence people. Even though our jobs are indeed technical in nature, the human component is
always present and it’s often the most challenging part of our jobs. We may have the technical knowledge
to help an end-user, but if they’re angry, frustrated, or otherwise upset, it’s our people skills that allow us first
to manage the situation successfully. Then we use our technical skills to solve the technical problem. This
is where tech support training for customer service improvement can really make a difference.

Not only do our people skills help us in our one-on-one interactions with our end-users, they also help
us deal with organizational politics: how we interact with other people, both individually and in groups. By
mastering people skills, we can learn to successfully navigate the political landscape in the office to gain
credibility with our co-workers, our end-users, and our bosses and, most importantly, gain their support
behind our backs.

It’s time to learn how to break the rules, abuse the tools, and generally turn your system administration knowledge inside out. This class is a cornucopia of ideas for creative ways to take the standard (and sometimes not-so-standard) system administration tools and techniques and use them in ways no one would expect. We’ll also cover some tools you may have missed.
Note: The teacher takes no responsibility should your head explode during this class.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:
Old-timers who think they’ve already seen it all and those who want to develop inventive thinking early in their career. Join us and be prepared to be delighted, disgusted, and amazed. Most of all, be ready to enrich your network and system administration by learning to be different.

TAKE BACK TO WORK:
New approaches to old problems, along with some ways to solve the insolubles.
Topics include:

How to (ab)use perfectly good network transports by using them for purposes never dreamed of by their authors